2020 Hindsight

Slouching toward 2001

Happy New Year's Eve!

I'm slouching toward 2001, still very fatigued from whatever-this-was I caught this week. There's no such thing as too much sleep.

In honor of 2001:

Is it Hal, or is it the spin cycle?
Fairhope, Alabama laundromat, 18 October, 2000.

Demographics for a fevered soul

Well, okay. That bit about fevered is a bit of an exaggeration. Fever's down, but the feverish-headache is not. If I was expecting a 24-hour flu, I'll be happy to get away with a 72 hour one.

Remember taking the census? I do: I spent at least two days this last March on this blog kvetching about it. WannaWrite posts links of preliminary Census results. Here's the ascii table of state populations and ranks (1990/2000). Surprise, Surprise: California is still number 1 in population, with 33.8 million. New York (18.9 million), formerly number 2, moved down a notch as Texas (20.8 million) moved up. (by the way, you can get this information as PDF, Excel or Ascii)

And Nevada, with Las Vegas as the fastest growing city in the U.S., jumped up four rankings (from 39 to 35), with a growth rate of 66% over the last 10 years! (1.2 million to 2 million)

See a map of the U.S. showing rates of population increase.

The Census calls this "the longest continuous scientific project in American Democracy". Fascinating, tho.. They show this historical perspective of population.

100 years ago (when my grandfather was born), the population of the entire nation (76.2 million) was a little more than twice the population of the current state of California. Or, the total country's population was little more than today's combined population of California, New York and Texas.

I'm hoping to find more information about the historical patterns of, say, the last 100 years. Change in the last 10 years isn't as interesting as the last 100.

I don't know why I'm astonished, but Wyoming, ranked #50 among states, has a population of less than 1 million people. Since I live in a city of some 30,000 people, in this huge metropolis of Los Angeles County (population 2-3 million or more?), the difference in density is hard to hold together in my brain.

. . . . . .

I keep thinking about what I read in A Pattern Language (and commented about sometime last year) about the ideal size of a community/neighborhood/locality being 10,000 ...at that size or below, and individual has a voice. Above that, an individual gets lost.

Paranoid?

If I were paranoid, I might have dark ways to interpret the following: Go rollerblading on Thanksgiving; Immediately fall ill of a bad cold. In bed for over a week. Two days ago, I took my niece and nephew ice skating, and yesterday I woke up full of malaise, ill and feverish.

I really like skating. I'm sure this is correlation without causation. Fooey.

Muddled Hasses

I was out with the huddled masses today at Fry's and Ikea, making sure that I've got tax-deductible business expenses for FY2000. Lots of people. Lots of stuff. I find shopping ennervating: liquid and food is so necessary to survive it all.

20 GB disk drive for my powerbook. Shelves for my office, bedroom, and powder room. Frames to hold pictures that I'll print out from among the many I made this year. Multimedia speakers for computer sound. Lights for the studio. DAT tape. CD cleaner.... in short, all sortsa stuff for da studio.

Christ Mass

Happy Christmas!!!!
I snuck my camera in to the 10:30 p.m. church service last night. (digital cameras take pix using available light and don't make any shutter clicking sound, so they're good for stealth image capturing without disturbing surrounding people)

The title of the service is Christ Mass. (get it?)

The choirloft is in the balcony behind the main portion of the church. (I'm told that the oboist had battery-operated lights on his oboe that he switched on when they played/sang Silent Night)

Here is the altar, with candles, candles and more candles. There were greens and pointsettas all over the church; quite beautiful.

Even the votive candles were festive and red!

Here's another picture of the choir, sans organist and choirmaster. My friend, who's in the choir, talked of her sore feet, standing for three hours: rehearsal beforehand, and standing to sing, or preparing to sing. "About the only thing we got to sit down for was the homily (sermon)!"

Here (sorry, a bit fuzzy), the priest prepares the altar table for the Christ Mass.

Merry Christmas to you all!!!

Christmas Eve

In my road trip pictures, I tried to find some that come close to the feel of Silent Night, Holy Night. They don't have the dark of night, but they are in twlight, with snowy mountaintops, and height — behold! the Continental Divide! (aka "the divide" as I told about in my The The musings)

Loveland Pass in Colorado is 11,990 feet above sea level, each picture was taken a little below the pass itself, on the eastern and western sides of it.

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Postage for Procrastinators Tis the season to receive Christmas Cards and annual letters. Reading the letters has been fun, and my heartstrings tug at the notion of composing one of those myself. This season, I'm a full-on slacker, so there's no excuse (well, other than slacking) to keep me from writing, illustrating, printing out and sending an end-of-the-year letter. Hm. Doing an annual review of this site would be a good thing for letter-making. Deadlines, however arbitrary, are good: At the post office yesterday, I was reminded of the increase in postage effective January 7. So, I'll get my Christmas letters out before Epiphany (Jan 6) and save a penny per letter postage.

Low-Key Christmas Christmas is very low-key this year. My family got together last weekend in New York for Grandpa's Hundredth, so I'll be spending it with friends here in town: Late night services tonight, followed by post-midnight mass supper, and a dinner-get-together tomorrow.

Trying Out Radio

I think I remember this
I think I remember doing this, way back in the days of Manilapalooza; that's when Pike first came out. So I anticipate that when I use the save command, it will update this page for this new story.

All rightie then; it did as I expected. Goodie. So, next, what shall I do?
Hmmmm... this is a paragraph where I used Shift Return.
Nuthin doing. Maybe I have to do that silly rules thing to make it all work out.

• list stuff
  
• list other stuff
  

Yeah. Now I wanna figure out how to make a directory. What's cool is the process of saving here on the desktop and then that becomes the process of updating a page. That part is cool in itself.


More thoughts. This is not from reading the docs (will do that in a bit, will prolly be thinking/exclaiming/muttering/whining over the next coupla days as I get up to speed), but from thinking simply about the one thing that just hit me over the head (Saving in outline is equivalent to updating web page). My site has a lot of pictures. (warning: long load time) Is there any way that I can organize something here on the desktop and have it automatically placed/uploaded as picture onto my site?

What happens next? Uh oh, there is text that, when I hit return, made the entire paragraph display with a blank. Weird. And I mighta hidden some html in there, too. Such as links and stuff like that. Dunno.

About links: Radio displays the links as underscores. But I haven't yet figured out how to access the URLs. I have a keyboard shortcut that I use when I've been editing my pages: I type a shortcut (hreftag) and then Typeit4me expands that to be the bare bones of the href anchor tag <a href=""></a>. Then I go and fill it in. Well, once I type that here in Radio, the anchor tag disappears. It probably has something to do with the fact that the other anchors are displayed as underscores without the url information. But that means that I gotta go to a dialog to insert a link. I don't know yet whether that's gonna be good news (oh, a new way that's better!) or a pain in the ass. Of course, since it's a change from the normal routine, it immediately strikes me as a pain in the ass. But I'll read up on the docs first.

Volcano

Oooh! I was just sent an url for pix of the volcano.

Page with tons o pix (Ya gotta click "search")

Here's an animating GIF of the volcano.

Stunning. Above the Cone. Sun low on horizon illuminating volcanic plume. Billowing Gray Smoke.
Latest Volcano Report

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Via Q: Love letters between Amazon and a customer. Is it me, or is it getting hot in here this last-minute shopping season?

This is more than consumer lust ­ the impulsive desire to buy, buy, buy you out till we're both dry and empty, panting for breath and mouthing the words "supply," "demand," "supply," "demand," with each in-breath and out-breath.

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Radio!! (warning: this may be utterly boring for many. It's mostly a stream of consciousness account of my experience editing this page using Radio UserLand)
I'm trying out the latest version of Radio. Haven't done Radio/Pike editing since back in the Manilapalooza days when Pike first went beta. Just now in my experimental page, Trying Out Radio, I grokked this one very important thing: The act of Saving here on the desktop is the act of updating the web page. That is very very cool.

But it looks as though I'll need to figure out some basic formatting things to do, such as making text bold and stuff like that.

More thoughts. This is not from reading the docs (will do that in a bit, will prolly be thinking/exclaiming/muttering/whining over the next coupla days as I get up to speed), but from thinking simply about the one thing that just hit me over the head (Saving in outline is equivalent to updating web page). My site has a lot of pictures. (warning: page has long load time) Is there any way that I can organize something here on the desktop and have it automatically placed/uploaded as picture onto my site?

What happens next? Uh oh, there is text that, when I hit return, made the entire paragraph display with a blank. Weird. And I mighta hidden some html in there, too. Such as links and stuff like that. Dunno.

About links: Radio displays the links as underscores. But I haven't yet figured out how to access the URLs. I have a keyboard shortcut that I use when I've been editing my pages: I type a shortcut (hreftag) and then Typeit4me expands that to be the bare bones of the href anchor tag <a href=""></a>. Then I go and fill it in. Well, once I type that here in Radio, the anchor tag disappears. It probably has something to do with the fact that the other anchors are displayed as underscores without the url information. But that means that I gotta go to a dialog to insert a link. I don't know yet whether that's gonna be good news (oh, a new way that's better!) or a pain in the ass. Of course, since it's a change from the normal routine, it immediately strikes me as a pain in the ass. But I'll read up on the docs first.

WOW I just looked at the page from an Edit This Page standpoint. Um. This is a totally different beast under the hood. I'm looking for something in here (Radio) that's kinduvan equivalent to "view source" where all the href stuff is visible, but without all the additional &lt; in place of left angle brackets.

My browser crashed while I was working on this, but I kept on working on this page in Radio, and then typed command-S. Here's something interesting: You don't even have to have the browser open anymore to edit changes to a page-in-progress. hmmmm! : )

Solstice

Happy Winter! Since this is the shortest day of the year, I decided to flip the page very very late! : )

Last Autumn Day

Does it feel like it's still autumn to you? Driving in the snow from the Lake George area to Albany airport, yesterday, I'd say no. But today in southern California, it's supposed to get up into the high 70s, so I'd say yes.

According to this site, Winter Solstice takes place December 21 at 13:37 (1:37 pm) GMT, which translates to December 21 5:37 am Pacific Time. Tonight is the longest night of the year.

Pyroclastic I saw some awe-inspiring photos of Popocatepetl Volcano on the LA Times web site last night, but I can't find em again. Drat. However, Yahoo's News Photos has lotsa volcano pictures.

Group Hug to Sandra and Martin and Raphael Spernau